Hindenburg alleged that when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days. Opera also falsely advertised longer loan terms and lower interest rates in the app descriptions, because the Google Play Store had rules against predatory loan services. The loan apps specifically targeted customers in Kenya, India, and Nigeria. Hindenburg also confirmed through user reports and a former employee that two of the apps, OKash and OPesa, asked for permission to the phone contacts during the setup process. The service would then start sending threatening messages to the user's contacts when a borrower was late on their payments. The issue was also covered by local media prior to Hindenburg's report. The money from these loan apps amounted to 42.5% of Opera's revenue by mid-2019. Yes, almost half of Opera's revenue came from extracting money from people in developing countries with false advertising and direct harassment. Corbin Davenport As if this wasn't horrible enough, Opera also pushed the usual crypto and NFT scams, and is now chasing that AI" high by adding spicy autocomplete to its Chromium skin. Much like Brave - good people don't let friends use Brave - Opera is just a veneer around shady business practices, and you just shouldn't use this garbage. Just use Firefox.
After three years of delays, Merced shipped as Itanium on the 29th of May in 2001. The first OEM systems from HP, IBM, and Dell were shipped in June. Itanium, whose architecture was now referred to as IA-64, was a 6-wide VLIW chip running at either 733 to 800 MHz with a 266 MT/s front side bus. It had 16K of L1 cache, 96K of L2 cache, 2 or 4 MB of L3 cache, and it was a single core chip on socket PAC418 built on a 180nm process. That this chip under performed is an understatement. Given the long development time, multi-billion-dollar development cost, significant hype, and claims that it would out-compete everything on the market... Itanium was a massive failure. The 32 bit x86 chips of the time were able to best it in most workloads. Embarrassingly, the Pentium 4 (whose own performance wasn't that good) beat Itanium on integer performance and memory bandwidth. Those areas where the chip was strong were in transaction processing and scientific applications. John Crawford, Merced project leader at Intel, reflects: Everything was crazy. We were taking risks everywhere. Everything was new. When you do that, you're going to stumble." The five hundred person team working on the chip was also relatively inexperienced, and disagreements between HP and Intel led to many compromises in design. Bradford Morgan White Itanium is the future. This entire article is anti-Itanium propaganda and misinformation. Do your own research.
The Wine project emulates the Windows API in user space. One particular part of that API, namely the NT synchronization primitives, have historically been implemented via RPC to a dedicated kernel" process. However, more recent applications use these APIs more strenuously, and the overhead of RPC has become a bottleneck. The NT synchronization APIs are too complex to implement on top of existing primitives without sacrificing correctness. Certain operations, such as NtPulseEvent() or the wait-for-all" mode of NtWaitForMultipleObjects(), require direct control over the underlying wait queue, and implementing a wait queue sufficiently robust for Wine in user space is not possible. This proposed driver, therefore, implements the problematic interfaces directly in the Linux kernel. Elizabeth Figura on the lkml This proposed driver would yield some serious performance results.
In order to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple has announced a set of sweeping changes to iOS and the App Store in the European Union. First and foremost, starting with iOS 17.4, users in the European Union will be able to download and install applications from outside of the App Store. On top of that, alternative application stores will become possible as well. When a developer submits an application to Apple, the developer can choose to distribute the application through the App Store, alternative application stores, or both. Apple will not charge a commission on installations from outside the App Store, and it will also allow alternative payment processors, over which Apple will also not charge any additional fees. Apple will, however, charge something called a Core Technology Fee". Under the new terms, apps distributed through the App Store which choose to use an alternative payment system will pay a 17 percent commission (rather than 30 percent) on digital goods and services. This commission rate falls to 10 percent for any apps that currently qualify for Apple's reduced small business" rate. The additional 3 percent fee then applies for developers who choose to use Apple's payment processing system. The company is also introducing a new type of fee for particularly popular apps. The new Core Technology Fee will charge developers 0.50 (around 54 cents) per annual app install; however, this fee only kicks in after a million annual installs in the EU. Apple estimates that over 99 percent of developers will either reduce or maintain the fees they owe to Apple" under the new business terms and that less that 1 percent" of developers would pay a core technology fee. Jon Porter at The Verge Overall, developers in the EU will be paying a lot less to Apple than developers in the US and elsewhere, while also gaining more options of distributing their applications outside of the App Store. I'm already seeing some serious rumblings in Apple developer circles over on Mastodon, where US-based developers are not happy these serious cost reductions will only apply to EU developers. The only kink in the cable is this Core Technology Fee", though, as the total bill for that nebulous cost can balloon quickly. Apple will still check applications outside of the App Store for safety, security, and privacy, though, with a system very similar to how macOS handles applications outside of the Mac App Store right now through a new - to iOS - notarisation system. This notarisation will not check applications for quality (because as we all know, the App Store is a beacon of quality) or content (hello emulators!). Another major change coming to iOS is the availability of browsers other than Safari. Right now, even if you think you're using an alternative, non-Safari browser on iOS, you're really just using a skin on top of a hobbled version of Safari. In the EU, starting with iOS 17.4, non-WebKit browser engines like Firefox' Gecko or Chrome's Blink can come to iOS, and live as equal citizens on your iOS device. Furthermore, NFS on iOS will be opening up in Europe, giving European users the ability to use services other than Apple Pay and Wallet with NFC, and even set them as default. Apple is also allowing game streaming services to come to iOS, and this change happens to be available worldwide instead of being restricted to just the EU. These are sweeping changes to how iOS and the App Store works, but much to the chagrin of US-based users and developers in my Mastodon timeline and elsewhere, they're exclusive to the European Union. It's unclear if Americans can import EU devices to gain access to these new features, or if they need EU-based Apple IDs. Let the grey market provide.
Starting with today's release of Chrome (M121), we're introducing experimental generative AI features to make it even easier and more efficient to browse - all while keeping your experience personalized to you. You'll be able to try out these new features in Chrome on Macs and Windows PCs over the next few days, starting in the U.S. Just sign into Chrome, select Settings" from the three-dot menu and navigate to the Experimental AI" page. Because these features are early public experiments, they'll be disabled for enterprise and educational accounts for now. Parisa Tabriz Chrome will automatically suggest tab groups for you (a sorting algorithm, very advanced technology), you can generate themes (mashing other people's real art togerher and picking a dominant colour from the result), and Chrome can generate text in text fields (spicy autocomplete). AI" sure is changing the world as we know it.
Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Debian-based distribution). If you've heard about Linux, which is known for its open-source software and an alternative to traditional operating systems (OS), and are curious to learn more, here are four reasons why you should give our new Firefox on Linux package a try. Gabriel Bustamente and Johan Lorenzo It's a ppa and .deb package straight from Mozilla itself, so you don't have to to rely on your distribution's maintainers (as long as you use a Debian-based distribution, that is). Do note, however, that some distributions actually make changes to the default Firefox code, such as Fedora enabling things like Wayland-by-default and hardware-accelerated video decoding long before those became default in Firefox-proper. By using Mozilla's package, you'll lose all of these changes. As a sidenote, Mozilla's instructions for enabling the ppa and installing the .deb are a bit... Dubious, though.
The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records. The leak, which contains LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms' user data, is almost certainly the largest ever discovered. Vilius Petkauskas at cybernews Holy cow.
Apple yesterday released iOS and iPadOS 17.3 as well as watchOS 10.3, tvOS 17.3, and macOS Sonoma 14.3 for all supported devices. iOS 17.3 primarily adds collaborative playlists in Apple Music, and what Apple calls Stolen Device Protection." Collaborative playlists have been on a bit of a journey; they were promised as part of iOS 17, then added in the beta of iOS 17.2, but removed before that update went live. Now they're finally reaching all users. When enabled, Stolen Device Protection requires Face ID or Touch ID authentication with no passcode fallback" for some sensitive actions on the phone. Samuel Axon at Ars Technica This last feature is something you should probably turn on right away, as it serves as a reply to Joanna Stern's investigation into an apparently common way iPhones would get stolen to gain access to users' Apple accounts.
Winlator is an Android application that lets you to run Windows (x86_64) applications with Wine and Box86/Box64. BrunoSX That's all you need to know. There are videos up of things like Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3 running through this, which is incredibly neat. I'm not entirely sure what the use case is, but who cares - this is an excellent idea.
In a major move addressing European regulations, Meta will soon give users in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland significantly more control over how their data is used across Facebook and Instagram. The changes, set to begin rolling out in the coming weeks, aim to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Omer Dursun at NeoWin You'll be able to unlink Facebook's various services - such as Instagram and Facebook's main social network thing - and you'll be able to use Facebook Messenger as a standalone service without needing to have a Facebook account. Sadly, there's no word on WhatsApp. This only applies to people in the EU/EEA. Americans need not apply.
It's a minimalist (currently <1K lines) pure Ruby (including the X11 driver) X11 window manager. It is focused on tiling, but allows you to choose to assign a tiling layout to specific desktops or leave them floating. Currently whether or not you use tiling or floating layout there is no window decoration and windows are not draggable or resizable by pulling on borders (but you can do that with Windows key + left/right mouse button) Like bspwm, which was an inspiration, the wm supports no keyboard handling - all keyboard handling is deferred to separate tools like sxhkd. Unlike bspwm this WM has no dedicated IPC mechanism. Instead, so far, all communication happens via X11 ClientMessage events, which means any tool, like xdotool etc. that can produce those events can control the WM. Vidar Hokstad on RubyWM's GitHub page In the blog post announcing RubyWM, the author makes it very clear that while he uses this WM full time, he is also willing to work around its bugs, and that certain tools will simply break if you use it. He considers it more of a tech demo, and that you really shouldn't rely on this for any serious work.
Smartwatches at the turn of the century were a more motley assortment than today's, with an even wilder range of functionality. If you had a few hundred dollars or so, there were some interesting options, even back then. But if all you had was $85 (in 2024 dollars about $150), you still weren't left out, because in 2001 you could get the Web-@nywhere (the Worldwide Web Watch"). Load up the software on your PC and slap it in its little docking station, and you could slurp down about 93K of precious Web data to scroll on the 59*16 screen - 10 characters by 2 characters - to read any time you wanted! That is, of course, if the remote host the watch's Windows 9x-based client accessed were still up, on which it depended for virtually anything to download and install. Well, I want 95,488 bytes of old smartwatch tiny screen Web on my wrist, darn it. We're going to reverse-engineer this sucker and write our own system using real live modern Web data. So there! Old Vintage Computing Research Y'all know the drill by now - I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. What a great, extremely detailed read, with code to boot.
This tilt manifests in a variety of ways. For example: making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user's default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers. For years, Mozilla has engaged in dialog with platform vendors in an effort to address these issues. With renewed public attention and an evolving regulatory environment, we think it's time to publish these concerns using the same transparent process and tools we use to develop positions on emerging technical standards. So today we're publishing a new issue tracker where we intend to document the ways in which platforms put Firefox at a disadvantage and engage with the vendors of those platforms to resolve them. The official Mozilla blog Excellent initative.
Haiku developer and community member Waddlesplash shares his insights on the project's current state, challenges ahead, and hopes for the future. Waddlesplash discusses Haiku's transition from a niche project to a potential daily driver OS, emphasizing the importance of maintaining momentum and addressing data corruption bugs. Andrea at Desktop On Fire! Haiku is definitely in a good place at the moment, and there's some real momentum from outside the project. Yes, it's even possible to daily-drive Haiku - with caveats, of course - and I hope they can keep this going.
Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment. One of the reasons I picked this apartment was age of the building. The construction was finished in 2015, which ensured pretty good thermal isolation for winters as well as small nice things like Ethernet ports in each room. However, there was one part of my apartment that was too new and too smart for me. It is obviously a touchscreen of some sort, but there was zero indication as to what it controls. The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power. Nikita Lapkov What follows is an investigation into what it is, how to get it working, and, of course, how to hack it and make it more useful.
FreeBSD is discussing adding Rust to the FreeBSD base system. In a recent thread on src-committers, we discussed the costs and benefits of including Rust code in the FreeBSD base system. To summarize, the cost is that it would double our build times. imp suggested adding an additional step after buildworld for stuff that requires an external toolchain. That would ease the build time pain. The benefit is that some tools would become easier to write, or even become possible. Warner Losh on the freebsd-hackers mailing list From everything I've read and what you, the readers, have told me, someone who isn't a programmer, languages like Rust really are a big improvement over older languages, and it's probably not a good idea for a major, important project like FreeBSD to isolate its base system from such progress. Now, I'm not at all qualified to say whether Rust, specifically, is the right choice, but a language like Rust should probably be part of the base system. A big issue is FreeBSD's architecture support. Rust is not well-supported or even supported at all on all the various platforms FreeBSD supports, which might prove to be a road block for now. That being said, letting barely used ISAs hamper your progress too much might not be a good idea either. Rust has already become a supported language for the development of the Linux kernel.
Without hesitation, our developer community quickly rallied behind the topic Sculpt OS usability", desiring to boost the user experience with respect to multi-monitor usage, convenient interactive UIs for common tasks, profound support for touchpads and touchscreens, tearing-free graphics, low-latency audio, casual on-target debugging, and suspend/resume. The focus on usability notwithstanding, we will steadily continue with the gardening of Genode's driver landscape, fostering the consistent use of drivers ported from up-to-date Linux kernels, clear-cut ACPI support, and making drivers pluggable. In 2024, we will also promote Genode's custom (base-hw) microkernel to become the default kernel for Sculpt OS, which is the culmination of a multi-year effort. Official Genode news post The updated roadmap for 2024 details the goals of the project for the coming current year.
Running into a blue screen of death, but don't want your journey to end? Well, how about dropping into a Linux shell when you hit a BSOD in Windows? We simply register a BugCheck callback. The callback function runs a tiny RISC V emulator running linux. For the video output we use bootvid.dll and for input we have a horrible simple polling based PS/2 keyboard driver. BugCheck2Linux GitHub page The gist here is that during a BSOD, drivers can reset a device to a known working state and gather diagnostic data, so what the BugCheck2Linux driver" does is load up an incredibly small RISC-V emulator, boot a Linux kernel, and drop you in a shell. An incredibly limited shell that can barely do anything, but a shell nonetheless. And when I say limited", I really do mean limited": it only works on BIOS systems, runs at 640*480 in 16 colours, the shift key doesn't work (you'll need to use caps lock for that), and you can't use backspace either. Still, this is an incredibly cool proof of concept, and I wonder if more is possible here. Who knows - this could become a valuable troubleshooting tool.
As part of our commitment to user safety, Google Workspace will no longer support the sign-in method for third-party apps or devices that require users to share their Google username and password. This antiquated sign-in method, known as Less Secure Apps (LSAs), puts users at an additional risk since it requires sharing Google Account credentials with third-party apps and devices that can make it easier for bad actors to gain unauthorized access to your account. Instead, you'll need to use the option to Sign-In with Google, which is a safer and more secure way to sync your email to other apps. Sign-in with Google leverages industry standard and more secure OAuth method of authentication already used by the vast majority of third-party apps and devices. Google Workspace Updates What this means is that all third-party apps that require password-only access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Contacts via protocols such as CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP, SMTP, and POP" will no longer work. Crucial to note, however, is that App Passwords will continue to work, which is good news, because without App Passwords, older IMAP email clients without OAuth support, such as the ones often used on legacy or minor operating systems, would cease to work with Gmail.
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work. Let me quote myself from a little bit further into that piece, on the subject of Google: I'm sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief." Well, yeah. This is in my mind these days as I'm on a retired-Googlers mailing list where the current round of layoffs is under discussion and, well, it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex. Tim Bray The honeymoon phase with the technology sector is well and long over, and we're deep into an unhappy, unpleasant, joyless marriage now - and the fault lies entirely with the big technology companies themselves. They promised they'd change the world for the better, but they lied - and still lie - about the price.
What follows is a letter from Hans Reiser to myself, which he wrote some two months back, and has asked me to publish, with his thoughts on the deprecation of ReiserFS from the Linux kernel. I have transcribed it to the best of my ability. Plaintext email may not be the best way to read it, as such, I have also made available PDF and HTML versions of the letter. Fredrick R. Brennan Hans Reiser is the creator of the ReiserFS file system, which used to be a serious contender for the Linux file system you'd use in the early 2000s. In 2006, Hans Reiser murdered his wife, and is currently serving a prison sentence for this crime. Hopefully, after he completes his prison sentence, he can become a contributing member of society once again, if the professionals and specialists involved in such matters deem him capable of doing so. The long letter mentioned here was actually quite a fascinating read, and details his abrasive behaviour in the Linux world, the design of ReiserFS and its place in the ecosystem at the time, and his thoughts on the removal of ReiserFS from the Linux kernel.
Broadcom's brutal assault on VMware's product suite continues, with the company's new owner this week confirming that it is sunsetting a massive 56 VMware products and platforms - as investors said this week that they anticipated a tectonic shift" in the infrastructure market as a result. In a January 15 advisory VMware confirmed tersely that it was taking a sweeping range of products to End of Availability" and that these products are no longer available for purchase" - although most remain advertised enthusiastically, for now, on slick corporate website pages. Ed Targett The list of products is a thing to behold, for sure. I don't think I've ever seen that many enterprise products together in one list, and I once spent weeks scouring and dealing with HPE.
The Chrome team is excited to announce that WebGPU is now enabled by default in Chrome 121 on devices running Android 12 and greater powered by Qualcomm and ARM GPUs. Support will gradually expand to encompass a wider range of Android devices, including those running on Android 11 in a near future. This expansion will be dependent on further testing and optimization to ensure a seamless experience across a broader range of hardware configurations. Francois Beaufort Mind you, this is about WebGPU, not WebGL.
I always liked small laptops and phones - but for some reason they fell out of favor of manufacturers (bigger is more better"). Now if one wanted to get tiny laptop - one of the few opportunities would have been to fight for old Sony UMPC's on ebay which are somewhat expensive even today. Recently Raspberry Pi/CM4-based tiny laptops started to appear - especially clockwork products are neat, but they are not foldable like a laptop. When in summer of 2023 Sipeed announced Lichee Console 4A based on RISC-V SoC - I preordered it immediately and in early January I finally received it. Results of my testing, currently uncovered issues are below. Mikhail Svarichevsky I want one of these.
AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in the software development life-cycle and can improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant concerns about their usage in practice. In this paper, we conduct a user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants to solve a variety of security related tasks. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code. To better inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our user-study apparatus and anonymized data to researchers seeking to build on our work at this link. Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh I'm surprised somewhat randomly copying other people's code into your program - violating their licenses, to boot - leads to crappier code. Who knew!
Since the last article on the text-based IDEs of old, I've been meaning to write about the GCC port to DOS, namely DJGPP. As I worked on the draft for that topic, I realized that there is a ton of ground to cover to set the stage so I took most of the content on memory management out and wrote this separate post. This article is a deep dive on how DOS had to pull out tricks maximize the use of the very limited 1 MB address space of the 8086. Those tricks could exist because of the features later introduced by the 80286 and the 80386, but these were just clutches to paper over the fact that DOS could not leverage the real improvements provided by protected mode. Julio Merino The DOS memory story is a string of hacks upon hacks that somehow managed to work - and that still work today.
Google has detailed more of the changes it's implementing to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act. We already covered the changes to linked services, but Google is also changing how results related to shopping and booking results are displayed. We will introduce dedicated units that include a group of links to comparison sites from across the web, and query shortcuts at the top of the search page to help people refine their search, including by focusing results just on comparison sites. For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more. These changes will result in the removal of some features from the search page, such as the Google Flights unit. Oliver Bethell Google is also releasing its promised Google Takeout API, allowing developers to programmatically deal with users wanting to take their data out of Google to another service. This one in particular I'm interested in, since I'm curious if, say, a competing email service will make it easier and automatic to move away from Gmail.
Made to run natively on all modern operating systems and browsers, Ruffle brings Flash content back to life with no extra fuss. Ruffle website It's using Rust and WASM, making it supposedly safer than the real Flash PLayer ever was, and of course, it's open source too. Their most recent progress report details just how far along this project already is.
Recently, the oldest known versions of DOS were uploaded to the internet, and Michal Necasek dove into the floppy images. Even after more than 40 years(!), old software releases and pre-releases can still surface. In the case of 86-DOS 0.11 and 0.34 it's practically a miracle, since there were probably never very many copies in existence. For the first time since the early 1980s, FAT formatted floppies with the primordial 16-byte directory entry format have come to light. The old 16-byte directory entries were gone by 86-DOS 1.0 in April 1981 and of course never appeared in any public PC DOS release. These prehistoric versions of 86-DOS allow us to fill in further missing pieces in the puzzle of DOS origins. It is fascinating to follow how DOS developed from almost nothing to a multi-million dollar business in the course of just a few years. Michal Necasek It started out so humbly. Yet, here we are, in 2024, and variants of DOS still have their uses in certain niches. An incredible legacy, for sure.
We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web. Brian Thompson, Mehak Preet Dhaliwal, Peter Frisch, Tobias Domhan, Marcello Federico As a translator myself, this is entirely unsurprising. Translating is a craft, a skill, and much like with any other craft, you get what you pay for. If you pay your translator(s) a good rate, you get a good translation. If you pay your translator(s) a shit rate, you get a shit translation. If you pay nothing, you get nothing. I'm definitely seeing more and more people in my industry integrate machine translations, but so far, it's not been an actual issue - I have no qualms about accepting a job where I take a machine-translated text and whip it into shape and turn it into a human-readable, quality translation... As long as people pay me a reasonable rate for it. Working from a machine translation is often quicker and easier, so the going rate obviously reflects that. The quality of machine translations is absolutely atrocious, however, and the idea of relying on it for texts other people - customers, clients, employees, etc. - are actually supposed to read and work from is terrifying. Google Translate is an effective tool for personal use, but throwing, I don't know, your product's manual at it and dumping the unedited result onto your customers is borderline criminal. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Netscape Composer was my first introduction to web development. As a kid, I created my first web pages using it. Those pages never made it online, but I proudly carried them around on a floppy disk to show them off on family members' and friends' computers. This is likely how I got the understanding that websites are just made of files. Using Netscape Composer also taught me basic web vocabulary, such as page" and hyperlink". Of course, the web landscape has evolved immensely since then. I was curious to try out that dated software again and see what its limitations were, and what the code it produces looks like from a 2024 perspective. The first thing I needed was a goal. I decided to try and reproduce the home page of my personal website as closely as the application allowed it. That seemed like a sensible aim as my website has a rather minimalistic design, with very little that should be completely out of reach for an antiquated tool. Pier-Luc Brault What a fun exercise.
I recently bought a Macbook because more and more people are asking me how to use Nix in certain situations under MacOS. In this article, we walk through installing Nix on MacOS and see how pleasant the experience is these days. After that, we show how to go declarative on MacOS with nix-darwin to enable compilation for Linux and Intel Macs, as well as some other nice features. Jacek Galowicz You can't click on a single link without tripping over people talking about nix.
As a platform, we strive to help developers responsibly build new businesses and reach wider audiences across a variety of content types and genres. In response to strong demand, in 2021 we began onboarding a wider range of real-money gaming (RMG) apps in markets with pre-existing licensing frameworks. Since then, this app category has continued to flourish with developers creating new RMG experiences for mobile. Karan Gambhir, director of Global Trust and Safety Partnerships" at Google Real-money gaming" is the most obvious and blatant rebranding of gambling" I have ever seen. Google, this is gambling. You're making it easier for scumbags to target the poor and swindle them out of the little money they have. This is a shameless attempt at increasing Google's revenue by making it easier to scam people into gambling. Everything about this post - and (mobile) gambling - is disgusting.
In contrast to that minimal experience, Google was seemingly working to bring the full might of Chrome to Fuchsia. To observers, this was yet another signal that Google intended for Fuchsia to grow beyond the smart home and serve as a full desktop operating system. After all, what good is a laptop or desktop without a web browser? Fans of the Fuchsia project have anticipated its eventual expansion to desktop since Fuchsia was first shown to run on Google's Pixelbook hardware. However, in the intervening time - a period that also saw significant layoffs in the Fuchsia division - it seems that Google has since shifted Fuchsia in a different direction. The clearest evidence of that move comes from a Chromium code change (and related bug tracker post) published last month declaring that the Chrome browser on fuchsia won't be maintained." Kyle Bradshaw at 9To5Google Up until a few years ago, every indication was that Google had big plans for Fuchsia, from workstation" builds to porting Chrome to developers using Fuchsia for Google Meet calls, and lots of other improvements, changes, and additions that pointed squarely at Fuchsia being prepped for use on more than just the Nest Hub devices. We're about a year later now, and everything has changed. The workstation builds have been discontinued, the Fuchsia team was hit harder by the Google layoffs than other teams, and now the Chrome port has been deprecated. All signs now point to Fuchsia being effectively a dead end beyond its use on Hub devices. At least Google had the decency to kill this before it released it.
Welcome to my comprehensive guide on recording audio and desktop screen on OpenBSD. In this blog post, I'm excited to share my personal setup and approach to efficiently capturing high-quality audio and video on one of the most secure and stable operating systems available. Whether you're a professional content creator, a developer looking to record tutorials, or simply an OpenBSD enthusiast, this guide is tailored to help you navigate the intricacies of screen recording in this unique environment. Alongside this step-by-step tutorial, I've also included a practical YouTube video to demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of the recordings you can achieve with this setup. So, let's dive in and explore the world of audio and video recording on OpenBSD! Rafael Sadowski The BSD world needs more of these kinds of guides and articles. I feel like the various BSDs have so much to offer to desktop users, especially now that there is a reasonable contingent of Linux users who aren't happy with the spread of things like systemd and Wayland, but the fact of the matter is that the BSDs are not as focused on desktop and laptop use as Linux has been. That's not a dig at BSD developers - BSD focuses on different things - but it does mean that people interested in using BSD on desktops and laptops need a bit more assistance.
We are trying out opening Copilot automatically when Windows starts on widescreen devices with some Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. This can be managed via Settings > Personalization > Copilot. Note that this is rolling out so not all Insiders in the Dev Channel will see this right away. Amanda Langowski, Brandon LeBlanc at the official Windows blog You will use the copyright infringement tool, Windows user.
Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's outlawed in that country. According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have used AirDrop to distribute scathing critiques of the Communist Party of China to nearby iPhone users in subway trains and stations and other public venues. A document one protester sent in October of that year called General Secretary Xi Jinping a despotic traitor." A few months later, with the release of iOS 16.1.1, the AirDrop users in China found that the everyone" configuration, the setting that makes files available to all other users nearby, automatically reset to the more contacts-only setting. Apple has yet to acknowledge the move. Critics continue to see it as a concession Apple CEO Tim Cook made to Chinese authorities. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The most damning aspect of this story is that Apple has been aware of this vulnerability in AirDrop since 2019, and has not addressed it in any way. The use of AirDrop by dissidents in China to spread critique of the Chinese government has been well-known, so it's not entirely unreasonable to conclude that Apple has been weary of closing this security vulnerability in order to not offend China - as further evidenced by the sudden changes to AirDrop as mentioned above. What's going to be interesting now is what Apple is going to do about this. Are they going to finally address this security hole, and thereby risking offending China? Will it fix the hole, but only in non-totalitarian countries? Will it just leave it open? Whatever they do, they'll end up offending someone.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an EU law that takes effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to keep certain Google services linked. Google's support site So what does linking services really do for you? When linked, these services can share your data with each other and with all other Google services for certain purposes. For example, linked Google services can work together to help personalize your content and ads, depending on your settings. It doesn't seem like unlinking will mean much, but but at least the option is there now - but only for EU/EEA citizens.
This is a Rom Image and hard disc image of RISC OS, built from the open ROOL sources, but compiled up in 26bit compatible mode. It mostly uses code from approx 2000-2002, compiled up with a set of contempory tools. It should be compatible with Acorn RiscPCs, A7000s, A7000+, and the emulator RPCEmu. Peter Howkins I'm not particularly well-versed in the world of RISC OS, but I think this build is targeting older machines that use 26bit ARM processors.
While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4'2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting. Developer Samuel Thibault shared that the GNU Hurd 64-bit port now has enough packages in the debian-ports archive to be able to bootstrap a chroot. A 64-bit Debian + GNU Hurd build daemon is getting setup and the other infrastructure work is coming along. Michael Larabel In addition, work has started to port Hurd to POWER9, and someone is working on bringing the Ladybird web browser to Hurd, for a more modern browsing experience, among many other points of progress.
Happy New Year, and welcome to 2024! We're on the home stretch putting together COSMIC DE, the new desktop environment made for Pop!_OS and other distros. Basically, it's the look, feel, and customizations. The goal for the COSMIC DE alpha is to feel like a complete product, albeit with features still to come. With a more stable alpha, we can better collect feedback on usability and focus on completing the Settings panels. From here, we can work towards an eventual 24.04 release over the summer. System76's blog I'm very excited to try this out once it's available.
At CES 2024, ASUS unveiled a new standard for motherboards, graphics cards, and cases. Called BTF (short for Back-to-The-Future), it offers much cleaner cable management with power connectors at the back of a motherboard. More importantly, it fully ditches the ill-fated 12VHPWR plug in favor of a much tidier (and probably safer) 600W PCIe connector. ASUS claims computers with BTF components are easier to assemble since all plugs and connectors are located at the back side of the motherboard tray without other components obstructing access to power, SATA, USB, IO, and other connectors. Therefore, you won't have to reach as far into the depth of your chassis to plug things in." BTF should also make cable management much more elegant, resulting in a tidy, showcase-ready build. Taras Buria at NeoWin The interior of PCs effectively hasn't changed since the '80s, and it feels like it, too. Many of the connectors and plugs are unwieldy, in terrible places, hard to connect/disconnect, difficult to route, and so on. A lot more needs to be done than putting the connectors on the back of the motherboard and integrating GPU power delivery into the PCIe slot, but even baby steps like these are downright revolutionary in the conservative, change-averse, anti-user world of PC building. I don't say this very often, but basically, look at the last Intel Mac Pro. That's what a modern PC should look and work like inside.
inally we're seeing another handheld vendor jump in with Linux. The AYANEO NEXT LITE was announced today and much like the Steam Deck, they plan to ship it with SteamOS! AYANEO are one of the top brands when it comes to PC handhelds, so it's really interesting to see them be one of the first to jump in like this. If Linux is a success for them, no doubt they will do more and other vendors will follow along. Liam Dawe It was inevitable for SteamOS to spread beyond just the Steam Deck, but an important note to make here is that Ayaneo is not working together with Valve. Instead, they're using HoloIso, one of the community-maintained variants of SteamOS anyone can use and install. I'm a bit surprised by this, since moving SteamOS beyond just Valve products in an official capacity seems like a no-brainer for Valve; they're not really in it for the hardware money, after all, and instead earn their money from Steam game sales. I'm fairly convinced this isn't the last time we're seeing a non-Valve product with SteamOS, but I'd rather have Valve involved in the process before spending any money on one of these.
Happy 2024, folks! Just when we thought we'd seen it all, an npm user named PatrickJS, aka gdi2290, threw us a curveball. He (along with a group of contributors) kicked off the year with a bang, launching a troll campaign that uploaded an npm package aptly named everything. This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies. The everything package and its 3,000+ sub-packages have caused a Denial of Service (DOS) for anyone who installs it. We're talking about storage space running out and system resource exhaustion. But that's not all. The creator took their prank to the next level by setting up http://everything.npm.lol, showcasing the chaos they unleashed. They even included a meme from Skyrim, adding some humor (or mockery, depending on your perspective) to the situation. Feross Aboukhadijeh I know this is a bad thing, you shouldn't do this, it harms a lot of people, etc., etc., but let's be honest here - this is a hilarious prank that showcased a weakness in a rather playful way. Sure, there were real consequences, but it doesn't seem like any of them caused any permanent damage, data loss, or compromised systems. What's worse, it seems this isn't even the first time stuff like this happened, so I find it baffling people can still do this. What are they doing over there?
The smallest PNG file is 67 bytes. It's a single black pixel. Here's what it looks like, zoomed in 200*: The rest of this post describes this file in more detail and tries to explain how PNGs work along the way. There's a big twist at the end, if that excites you. But I hope you're just excited to learn about PNGs. Evan Hahn I know way too much about PNGs now, information I won't ever need but am glad to have.
We may have been using APFS for nearly seven years, but some of its features remain thoroughly opaque. On Christmas Day, I posed the puzzle of 60 TB of snapshots being removed from a 2 TB disk. While we all accept that may be technically correct", for ordinary users it makes no sense. Suggestions that they should be educated" miss the point that the Finder has to be accessible to all users, whether or not they have a degree in Computer Science. If my eleven year-old granddaughter can't make sense of it, then the Finder is a failure. Today I turn to another thorny issue raised by the ingenuity of APFS: the size of its special file types, sparse and clone' files. As usual, I start with a practical demonstration. Howard Oakley I feel like I should ring a little bell while posting a link to this article.
Having re-discovered my love for FreeBSD on the desktop for the past month or so, I embarked in yet another adventure with it: creating a portable installation of it a USB drive so I could carry it with me on the go. This would be a great addition to my everyday carry, and would also again put the OS in test against many situations I have not had faced yet with it. Klaus Zimmermann Always a useful tool to have.
The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily. The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day to day*. Nearly 30 years ago, we introduced the Windows key to the PC keyboard that enabled people all over the world to interact with Windows. We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on the PC. Yusuf Mehdi on the official Windows blog Your next laptop will come with an AI" key next to the spacebar. Yes, Microsoft and Windows OEMs are really going to be doing this. Your laptop will come with a dedicated copyright infringement key that will produce utter nonsense and misinformation at the push of a key. This is pure and utter insanity.
When the AXP64 build tools for Windows 2000 were discovered back in May 2023, there was a crucial problem. Not only was it difficult to test the compiled applications since you needed an exotic and rare DEC Alpha machine running a leaked version of Windows, it was also difficult to even compile the programs, since you needed the same DEC Alpha machine to run the compiler; there was no cross-compiler. As a result, I began writing a program conceptually similar to WOW64 on Itanium (or WX86, or FX-32), only in reverse, to allow RISC Win32 programs to run on x86. CaptainWillStarblazer People with this much skill just exist.
Maestro is a lightweight Unix-like kernel written in Rust. The goal is to provide a lightweight operating system able to use the safety features of the Rust language to be reliable. Maestro's GitHub page The state of this project is actually kind of amazing - roughly 31% of Linux systemcalls are more or less already implemented, and it also comes with a daemon manager, a package manager, and can already run musl, bash, various core GNU utilities, and so on. It has kernel modules, a VGA text mode terminal, virtual memory, and a lot more.
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